


i call to mind a love that fades

by pelvicbones



Category: Victorious (TV)
Genre: Divorce, F/M, Old Fic, why the fuck am i posting this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-27 21:56:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21125867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pelvicbones/pseuds/pelvicbones
Summary: He signs the papers with a flourish.





	i call to mind a love that fades

**Author's Note:**

> posted this under my old fanfiction.net account (@sheriff stilinski) as "taking away what i want to say" a million years ago when i was pretty active in the victorious fandom. thought about it today, decided to rip it apart, and thought it was worth posting? idk  
new title is from jakob ogawa's "velvet light."  
hope you enjoy.

It’s eighty-five degrees and sunny the day they get divorced.

Beck’s never really been good at reading faces, but people look happy. There are people laughing and curling their fingers into the slats of the park benches. Dogs are wagging their tails. Ducks are swimming in the pond. The grass is tall, stretching to the sun.

Jade sits across him from a chess table. She’s wearing sunglasses that cover her face, lipstick the color of wine. He signs the papers with a flourish.

/

In the middle of the night, she asks him, voice too small, "What happened to us?"

He shrugs with his whole body, moves further away on the bed.

She whispers, "We used to be _fun_. We used to be in love."

Beck teeters on the edge of something. Sighs instead of trying to voice it.

/

He loses himself at the third drink. He shouldn’t be a lightweight at this point – usually isn’t. But this isn’t drinking for pleasure, it’s drinking for a way out of feeling, of returning home to an empty space, and that fucks him up more.

He can’t place the face when a figure places a hand on his shoulder, “I’m sorry, man.”

Beck throws up in the bathroom of the bar, limps back to the emptiness.

/

Sometimes, he wonders if Jade gradually changed or if it happened overnight. Wonders what prompted her evolution from being childish about her emotional ineptitude to being simply cold and secretive.

He still can’t place when he started to miss her and doesn’t know if he misses her anymore. He thinks he would miss himself too, if he did.

/

His father dies at an early age from liver failure.

The doctors hand him a bag with his father’s belongings that were found on his person. The typical things: wallet, keys, phone. The sucker punch: a wedding band still worn despite a broken marriage.

Jade calls from Montreal, where she was scouting for film locations, to say that she’ll be there as soon as her plane lands. Beck wishes, for a second, that she had just stayed.

/

Beck spends his nights at clubs for the first few weeks after the papers are signed. Tries to keep his eyes closed, dance until he loses what he wants to. The darkness paired with strobing lights masks the color of people’s irises. He can breathe. He can live for an hour or two.

One day, he manages to find Tori Vega in one of the clubs, nursing a half-empty glass between her palms. The liquid inside the glass is clear. The outside of her glass is perspiring into her skin.

When he slides into the space between chairs, blocking a man clearly about to attempt to make conversation with her, she gives him a sad smile. Raises a finger to get the bartender’s attention and, of course, two male bartenders bump into each other in their haste. They quietly bicker over who should procure her a glass of Ketel One, straight. It’s her go-to order when she’s scared and wants to scare someone off in turn.

The bartenders largely ignore him, so she has to slam back her drink and order another to get him one. He eventually sits down beside her.

/

Jade likes to lie. She always keeps it concise enough that if he wants more details, he has to beg for them. Lying for Jade is a game, but he’s beyond playing.

"Sorry. I stayed the night at Hannah's house."

He wonders if Hannah has seen Jade’s eyes change color when she lets herself feel everything, hands tightly curled into the bedsheets.

/

On bad days, he returns to better days. Days when she’d tilt her mouth upward and the room would fill with sunlight and shadows. When they’d nestle into one another on the couch for the day and they’d never turn on the lamp on the side table.

/

"Stay with me," he says.

The words sound foreign, but he’s compelled to say them. It sounds like he’s asking her where he left his keys, like any minute she’ll spit out a quip like she always does – did. He feels sweat drip down his spine.

She shakes her head too fast, pulls her suitcase tight against her as exits out the back door.

/

Tori and Beck don’t talk at the bar, just let the pulsing sound wash over them until she settles the bill without asking and pulls him by the hand toward the alleyway.

She pulls out a cigarette from a worn-out pack, hands shaking as she fumbles with the lighter and inhales deeply. He doesn’t think much about entangling their bodies together in an embrace, just does it. She sags against his weight, leaning her forehead against his throat. He wonders if she hears the flatline of his heartbeat or feels his Adam’s apple bob as he tries to swallow.

Her cigarette burns a hole in his shirt, but he doesn’t mind.

/

"I saw how you looked at her."

Her shirt is falling off her shoulders, wine glass precariously perched between two fingers. She should look sexy, he thinks. He should think she looks sexy. Maybe that was the whole point.

His eyelids obscure his vision from sleep deprivation as he asks, slowly, “Does it even matter to you, anymore?”

/

Sometimes, when he comes home from auditions, he notices furniture has been moved back to where they used to be placed.

He doesn’t change the locks, just moves the chairs back against the walls. Accepts that she’ll always have a hold over him.

/

When they were younger, she liked to call it fucking – and they would fuck, too. He’d fuck her into his sheets until they smelled like her lavender perfume and the sickly vanilla detergent his father would use. She would bite and pull and maim and it was beautiful and awful and nothing like he ever knew before her.

When they got married, she would call it making love with an ironic bite, but it was just that. They were two people who knew each other’s bodies more than anyone else’s. After they exchanged vows, their touches were slower, observations heightened. His chest dipped in underneath his left pectoral muscle. She had a jagged scar across her stomach that looked like it could’ve been cut with her less dominant hand. Their skin was always sticking together when they were slatted against one another and felt raw when they parted.

The whole experience was familiar, yet strange and new. She’d still mar his skin with her fingernails to make him wince, but her climax was sounded in sighs instead of screams.

/

Jade never liked to smoke. She didn't like the way it curled in the air. It was too unpredictable and wild and she was already enough.

He always wished she’d try for him, but she didn’t. Maybe that was a reason he loved her, then.

/

It's raining. A police car whizzes by with the siren blasting. The lights match her eyes, her lipstick.

Jade trembles without an umbrella. It’s almost vulnerable.

“Do you want to ask me again?” she asks. “If I would stay?”

Beck pauses, shakes his head. They both nod at one another before he closes his door.

He climbs back into bed as quietly as he can, but the voice that echoes through the room, still little and quiet, tells him that he wasn’t quiet enough.

“Thank you.”

/

They get married in a church on a rainy day in the middle of August. It's muggy and sweat is dripping down the faces of their well-dressed spectators. She’s been forced to wear an uncomfortable off-white dress that she detests. They can't hold hands because it’s too hot and slick when they try.

She grimaces when the priest talks about God and he doesn't know what he feels at the moment because his head is still spinning from his bachelor party.

He thinks, throughout high school, they marketed and advertised themselves as original, unpredictable people, but they never really could be anything but.

Predictable, that is.


End file.
